Split ends: political in-fighting in Israel

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0:40Hello, and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Bloor. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

0:55College sport in America is huge business, but one reason universities make so much money is that the biggest cost in other leagues, the players, are free. Stars aren't paid. And Sengen Shih Tzu was the 15th master of the Urasenki tea ceremony. Born into a long line of Zen priests, his path was mapped out for him as a child. And it was all about tea. And the meaning of life. Our obituaries editor remembers him.

1:31First up, though.

1:40The conflict in Gaza looks more and more like one of those forever wars that drag on no matter what. The Middle East where plans were a temporary ceasefire in Gaza may have hit an obstacle. Israel has new demands in order to stop the fighting. In recent weeks, the Israeli government wrote a ceasefire deal, Hamas agreed to it, and then Israel rejected it anyway. It is a famine in 2025. A 21st century famine watched over by drones and the most advanced military technology in history. A report from a global hunger monitor declaring a famine in Gaza was met with denial. The Israeli military bombed Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Hanunis a first time and then a second just as journalists and rescue workers had rushed to the scene.

2:28And the killing of journalists and civilians as part of the latest Israeli offensive generated a paltry few words of regret from the Prime Minister's office. The war represents a humanitarian catastrophe. But for one man, Bibi Netanyahu, continuation may actually be part of the plan. Throughout this war, Netanyahu's strategy is not to have a strategy on ending the war. And Shulfefa is our Israel correspondent. For political reasons, I think he doesn't have a clear idea yet of how Gaza should look at the end of the war. So he's just continuing with the status quo. And this status quo of war in Gaza is, of course, lethal for Gazans.

3:10It's dangerous for the Israeli hostages there. And it doesn't open any real alternative for the future. You mentioned political reasons. What do you mean by that? Netanyahu has been dithering over any real strategy for ending the war, mainly because he has a coalition in which far-right parties dream of annexing Gaza, of permanently displacing its population and building Israeli settlements there. So even though that's not the official policy of the government, Netanyahu won't close off that alternative by ending the war and by withdrawing from Gaza. So there's a very vague set of war objectives, which are to destroy Hamas's military capability and its governance in Gaza and to rescue the Israeli hostages.

3:5750 are still held in Gaza, 20 of whom are assumed alive. But there isn't any clear idea of how that can be achieved and what objectives is Israel aiming for in destroying Hamas. Because Hamas is not going to disappear as an organisation, as an ideology. They'll always have some kind of a presence in Gaza. So what still needs to be done to destroy Hamas? And what does that lack of strategy mean for Netanyahu's relationship with the military. So we've had tension between Netanyahu, Netanyahu and his government, and the general staff of the Israeli army, the Israel Defense Forces, almost throughout this war with Netanyahu, blaming them for the intelligence failures which led to the surprise of October 7.

4:41And then later on, when the war in Gaza didn't go exactly in the direction Netanyahu wanted, and once again blaming the commanders, we've had a replacement of the chief of staff. But it just keeps getting worse, this relationship. And we had, at the beginning of this week, the new chief of staff, he's been less than six months in his post, Lieutenant General Yal Zemir, making a public statement on his assessment that the Israeli operations in Gaza until now had created the circumstances which would allow a ceasefire and a hostage deal, basically saying that the entire operation that he has been ordered now to carry out the occupation of Gaza City over the next few months is something that he doesn't think is the right path to take.

5:27How is all this back and forth about what to do in Gaza affecting the situation there on the ground? Now you could say it's a more lower intensity war because this operation to occupy Gaza City has only just begun very preliminary stages in which the Israeli ground forces are manoeuvring on the outskirts of Gaza City. But there are airstrikes constantly. there is a situation where it's very difficult to get supply convoys into Gaza. Probably over a million people at this point have been displaced. And last week, a report confirmed that in Gaza City and other parts of the Gaza Strip, the starvation level is now famine in the most desperate form that they measure.

6:11And just on Wednesday, there were 10 reported deaths from hunger in Gaza. Anshu, you're saying that Netanyahu's political ambitions are having a direct effect on the course of the war. Where does he stand in Israel right now? Well, he's certainly with a minority of Israelis now who want the war to continue and think it still has some kind of an objective which makes sense. The latest polls have as many as 75 % of Israelis saying that this war should end. But as it's not happening, then there is major debates in Israel about who participate in this war. Many of the communities which are represented in Tenyao's coalition don't serve in the Israeli army, while the communities who do serve in the army include many of those who are against the war continuing.

6:56You have hundreds of thousands of people on the streets calling for an end to the war, mainly because they want to see the hostages coming home. And that is also a huge motivating factor within the Israeli public. But the prime minister is currently in political survival mode, and that means he's looking to his base, he's looking to his coalition. They don't want the war to end. And that's why any talk of ceasefire or plans for the day after are right now just talk because there isn't any political move towards ending the war. And if Netanyahu has his eyes on the election, which has to take place by the latest October 2026, how is that going to affect how this all plays out?

7:35Well, it does seem counterintuitive what he's doing right now. He's appealing to a part of the electorate, which is probably less than a third of the voters. And yet he's sticking with them because Netanyahu's strategy, which has worked, and it's one of the reasons why he is prime minister today, is to constantly focus on his base and keep ultra-religious far-right parties aligned with his Likud party in the hope that the opposition, even though the opposition will have more votes in the election, will be too divided to form a coalition and will actually lose votes because they'll be split into small parties.

8:09That's what happened in the last Israeli election. And I think currently that seems to be Netanyahu's plan yet again. And if we're looking at the Israeli opposition and we're talking about half a dozen leaders squabbling with each other and each of them think that they can be the next prime minister, then Netanyahu's strategy seems to be working. So what more can the international community do, or is it doing, to help end this seemingly intractable war? We've heard of the French government and perhaps also the British government planning next month to recognise the Palestinian state. Now, these diplomatic gestures could have down the road an impact.

8:44And then we have these very incoherent rumblings and musings from Donald Trump about how he'd like to end the war in two or three weeks. And at the same time saying, well, Hamas has to be destroyed. So Donald Trump is talking about this, but he doesn't have a strategy either. And there's a lot of talk about plans for the day after in Gaza, which seem right now totally detached from reality. We've even heard in recent days that Tony Blair, Britain's former prime minister, is working with the Trump White House and also with Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, on some grand plan for the day after in Gaza.

9:21And that just sounds like dream talk at this point, because there is no day after currently being planned by the Israeli government. They don't see any end to this war at this point. Anshol, thank you very much. Thank you for having me, Rosie.

10:03Thank you. proven infrastructure. Ready to talk with an expert? Visit bill.com slash proven and get a $150 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.com slash proven. Terms and conditions apply. See offer page for details.

10:24College sports in America are a big deal. Ohio State turns it over on down. And the Michigan Wolverines will shock the college football They're also big business. The University of Michigan Wolverines play in the world's third largest sports stadium, which can fit some 115 ,000 fans. Daniela Raz is a data journalist and U.S. correspondent. Gate receipts helped the university's football program generate$150 million in revenue last year. College sports as an industry is worth$19 billion. Last year, it generated twice as much revenue as the English Premier League. One reason it's so lucrative is because the athletes, usually the biggest expenses in professional leagues, are not paid.

11:14But as a new season kicks off this weekend, that is about to change. So Daniela, college athletes are turning professional? Yeah, so in June, a federal judge approved this landmark$2.8 billion settlement between the NCAA, which is the National Collegiate Athletic Association, that means it's essentially the governing body of college sports, and a coalition of current and former college athletes. So that money is meant to compensate players for all the years of lost earnings. And from now on, each university will be able to pay as much as$20.5 million every single year directly to its athletes.

11:59So in short, that means that the economics of college sports have essentially been rewritten. So if college athletes have been considered amateurs for decades, why is this happening now? So it's all culminating now, but this settlement comes after years of litigation. Some of the answer to that lies in antitrust law. For years, the NCAA had really strict rules that prevented schools from paying athletes. But the courts increasingly saw that as an illegal restraint, kind of like a cartel-like system that forced labor costs to be at zero, even though the entire industry, meanwhile, was raking in billions in ticket sales, broadcast rights, sponsorships.

12:42So judges ruled that basically the NCAA's business model violated antitrust protections. The first crack appeared in 2019 when California passed a law that would allow athletes to profit from what was known as their name, image, and likeness. So NIL is what we call that. And suddenly college athletes could make money as social media influencers, brand ambassadors. They could sign jerseys and make money off of that. And the NCAA basically fought this law all the way to the Supreme Court. and the Supreme Court upheld it nationwide. Brett Kavanaugh, who's a conservative Supreme Court justice, wrote the NCAA's business model would be illegal in almost any other industry in America.

13:29That Supreme Court decision cracked open this old amateur order and this latest settlement just blows it up entirely. So how did college sports stars feel about playing without being paid? The truth is that top college football programs and many top college basketball programs, because these are the most lucrative sports, have long essentially looked like professional outfits just without those salaries. You can see it in the massive crowds, the sponsorships, the TV viewership numbers. In most of America's states, something like 43 of them, the highest paid public employee is not the governor, but a college football or basketball coach.

14:12So there was just this insane unevenness between who was profiting from this system. And for decades, the justification for that was that these athletes were students first. And so the top athletes were reimbursed in academic scholarships. They were celebrated as contributors to campus life, to school spirit. College football players did, even though they were formerly unpaid, they benefited from these really luxurious facilities that were used to lure them. were talking, I mean, really extravagant stuff, marble-lined showers in their locker rooms, leather chairs upholstered with Ferrari leather.

14:50Whether they were happy to play under those conditions, no, but they really didn't have much of a choice, especially for the NFL, because the NFL, the National Football League, which is the richest sports league in the entire world, basically requires players to play three years of college football before they can even enter the NFL draft. So it didn't really matter how unhappy they were about it. They had absolutely no alternative for these very lucrative sports. And you said this new ruling blows the industry's economics up, completely changes it. What's it going to look like? I think on one hand, it's going to bring in some much needed fairness.

15:30It has the potential to replace a lot of these under the table perks, a lot of shady deals that had long enriched a lot of players. and the NCAA was really bad at policing this terrain. It also has the potential to reform these NIL deals I mentioned earlier. The NIL system over the last few years, they were these shady third-party collectives, which I would say most resembled political super PACs. And they sprung up and funneled staggering amounts of money to athletes to nominally pay them for their name, image, and likeness. But what was actually happening is that this was already pay for play.

16:11And so there were just very few rules and it was kind of the wild, wild west since 2019. And so this can change that by just formally saying universities have 20.5 million and you can literally directly pay your players. You were talking about staggering amounts of money. If we're now saying that universities are going to have to pay former stars as well, how is that going to affect their economics? Athletic departments are basically going to need to reorganize their budgets. Many schools are just not going to have that kind of money to pay their athletes competitively. That is going to probably widen the gap between these very wealthy programs and everyone else.

16:55So some universities might have to scale back certain sports. I think the other thing that's going to affect what universities can afford is Title IX, which is the gender equity law for universities that receive federal funds. Historically, that has meant for sports that the universities have to offer an equal number of athletic scholarships for men and women's sports. But what happens now? Do universities have to split that$20.5 million revenue equally across men and women? or are the market forces going to determine pay, which means that college football, a men's sport, and men's basketball will get the vast majority of that money.

17:38So I would say that the system is going to go through a good few years of needing to stabilize, seeing where this all lands after all this legislative dust settles. And are you excited for the new season? Yes, very. So I went to the University of Michigan, which is sometimes jokingly referred to as a cult. So I am personally very, very excited. I think that college football has been very lucky that they can always rely on super devoted supporters like myself, that we are not going anywhere. Daniela, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

18:30Tomorrow on the Weekend Intelligence, our correspondent looks at Hurricane Katrina 20 years on. When Katrina hit New Orleans, the devastation was immense. People stood on their roofs waiting to be rescued and waded through streets up to their waists searching for a way out. It was the most deadly storm to hit America since the 1920s, and the city is still recovering. Tomorrow we look at that long legacy, and as ever more places struggle for survival against the forces of nature, ask what Katrina tells us about that enduring battle. You'll need to be a subscriber to listen.

19:21At the tea compound in the Japanese city of Kyoto, which belonged to Senjenshitsu, the guests arrived through a little wooden gate and walked up a snaking path, passed beautifully manicured pine trees, which the master had arranged himself, and came at last to a little house, very unpretentious like a mountain hermitage with unpainted clay walls. Anne Rowe is The Economist's obituaries editor. There they met the master, and he bowed to them in silence to welcome them. He was no ordinary tea master, however. Although he was the 15th master of the Urasenke School of Tea Ceremony, he didn't believe that the ceremony should be confined to Japan.

20:19Instead, he wanted to spread it through the world and try to soothe the world's troubles by bringing them the peace of drinking tea in a gathering as a form of meditation and contemplation. The very best part of the ceremony he always felt was that all the barriers that there might exist between them, social barriers or class or gender or anything else, would be removed by simply drinking tea together. There was a principle which translates loosely as no host, no guest, No one was higher than anyone else. They were all equal, all the same, one entity in contemplation.

21:14And he had not often been in that state before he had become the tea master. His childhood had been a very strange and privileged one because his father was the 14th tea master. He had been brought up entirely in a world of tea so that his toys were the ash from the ceremonial fire on which the kettle was boiled. He would learn deportment by carrying a heavy ceramic brazier up and down the hall. His father taught him all the rules of being a tea master, and very severely, and his mother would sit outside the sliding paper doors and test him later on everything he was meant to have learned. At high school, he went to ordinary high school, but the boys there ragged him because his whole career was mapped out for him and they thought he was very lucky to have such an easy life.

22:14He wouldn't have to take exams. But he felt at that stage very burdened by what he knew he would have to do and also very distinct and separate from other boys.

22:31The only real time he lost that feeling of separateness was during the Second World War when Japan was beginning to lose in the Pacific Theatre and 200 young university students, as he then was, were recruited to become kamikaze pilots. That is, they had to learn how to crush their planes and their bodies onto enemy American ships. So in October 1944, he joined this special attack force, as it was called, and he and his colleagues had only 40 or 50 hours of training, really nothing much. And they took an oath of propriety and righteousness, a simple life, which oddly was already rather like the oath he had had to pledge himself to to be a master of tea.

23:27But of course it was put to this terrible suicidal end. He held a few tea ceremonies for his battle comrades at the base before they went, to try to steady their nerves. But the strange thing was that on the day appointed for him to go, all the others went off to Okinawa and never returned. He had been taken from the list and he never found out exactly why but he was spared, possibly because it was known that he was the son of a famous tea master.

24:12At first, this fact that he had survived when his colleagues had gone to their almost instant deaths was a terrible thing, he could hardly bear it. But then he began to think that their lives had actually been transferred to him and that he had a duty henceforward to spread his own word, to spread the word of the tea ceremony and the achieving of peace through tea all through the world.

24:46He began to travel and he began to travel most appropriately by going to America. So he landed there with a great bag of safeguarding charms provided by his parents and a worry that he'd be seen as an enemy citizen. But he found kindness everywhere and this encouraged him. He travelled more and more over the years, always performing the tea ceremony where he thought he could do most good and bring most peace. And among the people who drank his tea were Queen Elizabeth, Pope John Paul II, Angela Merkel and George W. Bush.

25:31he liked to think of the story of a monk who once asked his master what is the way and the master replied the way is your daily life so for senjenshitsu the way was his life in tea

25:53Anne Rowe on Senjian Shih Tzu, who has died aged 102.

26:19is Will Rowe. Our audio correspondent is Sarah Larniuk and our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Henrietta McFarlane and Benji Guy and our assistant producer is Anne Hanna. With extra production help this week from Emily Elias, Maria Clara Montoya and Eleanor Sly. We'll all see you back here for the Weekend Intelligence tomorrow.